In justifying the action, Rabbi Lau said that the need for DNA testing stems from the contradiction between halachah, which requires a person’s mother to be Jewish, and Israel’s Law of Return, which grants citizenship to anybody with one Jewish grandparent regardless of whether it is on the father or mother’s side.
Rabbi Lau said: “The onus is on a person wanting to claim that they are [halachically] Jewish to prove it to the rabbinical court and in every case the rabbinical courts strive to work with sensitivity to help and to make things easier in the Judaism clarification process.”
“In some isolated instances it has happened that somebody insists that he knows that he is Jewish but does not have the documents available that confirm what he says, or a contradiction is found in what he is saying. In such cases, in order to help the person, the court proposes that the claimant undergo a DNA test to strengthen his claim.”
Rabbi Lau added that because DNA testing is not officially recognized as proof of Judaism by the Orthodox establishment it “does not fully clarify if a person is Jewish according to halacha, but helps in the enquiries.”
He insisted nobody is forced into undertaking the tests.
But Rabbi Seth Farber, director of Itim, an body that helps Israelis to navigate the rabbinical bureaucracy and which has documented 20 recent cases of Israelis being sent for such DNA testing, said that because the Orthodox rabbinate has a monopoly on Jewish marriage in Israel, the DNA test demand is in practice a form of coercion.
In the cases documented by Itim, many of those applying for marriage licenses were also required to bring DNA tests from their mothers. The entire process was described as “arduous, awkward, inconvenient and sometimes humiliating.”
